Foreign Affairs

Shortly after midnight on June 6, 1944, the sky above the Normandy market town of Sainte-Mère-Église quietly grew thick with billowing silk as American paratroopers dropped into the night ahead of the long-expected Allied invasion of Europe; by …

Over the last few weeks, I've been writing about the Italian campaign in Ethiopia (1935–36), one of the many wars between the two world wars. We often speak of the "interwar" period, but in fact it was chock full …

Last week I had some fun here, talking about a mighty warlord of the 1930s deciding to launch a war against a smaller and weaker adversary, and in the process precipitating World War II. Trying to be clever, I saved …

Double Cross
The True Story of the D-Day Spies
By Ben Macintyre. 416 pp.
Crown, 2012. $26.
While the Allies were securing their tenuous beachhead at Normandy, the Germans kept the bulk of their forces north of the Seine River, …

The Rape of Nanking
The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
By Iris Chang. 314 pp.
Basic, new edition 2012. $15.99.
This passionate book, recently reissued, is bristling with facts, figures, and the memories of witnesses. They put flesh on …

On March 15, 1939, German troops marched through Prague's historic Wenceslas Square and occupied what was left of the Czechoslovak Republic—only six months after British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had bartered the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler for "peace in …

The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Vietnam War, by David Zierler, provides an examination of the first great ideological battle between nascent environmentalism and cold war dogmatism

Last week we asked the Japanese army a somewhat sarcastic question: What were you guys thinking?
I'd argue that the Japanese decisions of 1931, 1937, and 1941 make almost no sense unless we delve back a bit into Japanese history. …

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